Neu!Boots DAY TWELVE – Sean O’Brien

England’s Glory

A late example of the picturesque, composedWith dynamite and labour,William Armstrong’s sylvan waterfallRoars like the ghost of a dreadnought.This is where the thalassocracy retired.

First light, a week before the Somme centenaryRe-mourns the Tyneside Scots and IrishFed into the mincer with the rest,Two stubborn lads of forty-odd stand-to,Knee-deep in the curdled flow, their tabs all gone,

Last bottles held aloft. Just someone dare.Just some cunt fuckin dare, that’s all I’m saying.I came here for an hour to escapeThe massacre. And what you fuckin lookin at?Humiliation, pain, an undiminished gift

For missing every point that history makes.So I just wave. Down where the water slows,A spectral twist of oil suspends itself.I see one take a box of England’s GloryTo light the sick river. They stand their ground.

Sean O’Brien is a multi-award-winning poet and critic who has published more than a dozen collections of poetry, essays and criticism. His latest collection The Beautiful Librarians was published by Picador in 2015.

New Boots – the Anthology!

A selection of 100 poems from the project is now available in book form from Smokestack (price £8.99) - go here to order.

"Why the devil I throw my money away for that which the blockheads wish?" (G.F. Handel)

Welcome poets, polemicists and the disbelieving masses

The 2015 General Election made manifest the great sea-change that had been occurring in UK politics over the last fifteen to twenty years. Previous certainties, like Labour’s Scottish hegemony, are no more. Older patterns, like Conservative dominance of England, reasserted themselves.

The idea of the UK as a single country has been replaced by a plurality of identities, some long known to the other countries and regions, others formulating themselves as time passes. For that reason, we thought it might be an interesting experiment to chart the responses of those unacknowledged legislators, the poets, over the first 100 days of the new dispensation.

We ended up publishing a poem a day for 138 days, each one responding to some aspect of the new unrealpolitik. We then set to editing a book of 100 poems in order to, as we thought then, conclude the project.

However, the results of the EU Referendum showed that the slow slew in British political identity toward disillusionment and division had reached a breaking point that made even more evident the contrasts already indicated by the Scottish referendum and the General Election. We felt we had to begin again...

Stay with us, and see what the hell happens next. Oh fuck, it's Trump.

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